Duck, duck....GOOSE!

I don't have a lot to write today.  I am just aiming to get back to cooking more and blogging about it.

Because it's been far, far, far too long.

To the title above....we've cooked duck before, and quite successfully if I do say so myself.  But I didn't blog about it because life got in the way....too busy, too focused on other things, insert excuse here, blah blah, etc.

Now, today, I am looking for ideas for cooking a whole goose because, well, we have one in the freezer and, sooner or later we'll be getting another delivery from our poultry CSA and will need to make room.  We should have time to do this goose adventure next weekend.

So what say you?  How have/would you cook a whole goose?

Muchos grassyass in advance!

Jamaican Jerked Goat Neck

It was decided over the weekend that the time had come to dive in and use up the goat neck that we’d gotten from meat club.  It's not that we were afraid of it or anything; we’ve eaten (and loved) goat before, and are all about trying new things -- we just knew it’d require a long cook process and had not had time in so long.  So, we researched, and settled on a jerk seasoning flavor profile found on the NPR website (scroll to the bottom of the linked page for the original).  The seasoning mix is where following someone else’s recipe ended.  After that, I worked on my own and came up with what both Hubby and I think was as pretty darn good meal (or four, or five -- there were, as always, leftovers).

So the first thing I did, as instructed by the “Goats in The Kitchen” dude, Bryan Miller, was to marinate the goat neck in a mixture of beer and lemon juice over night.  I used an Amstel Light and one whole lemon’s worth of juice.

The next morning, I put together the jerk rub by combining the following things in the food processor:

• 1 onion, rough chopped
• 10 cloves of garlic
• 2 tablespoons of dried thyme
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
• 1 tablespoon whole allspice
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 3/4 teaspoon cayenne
• 1/4 cup of soy sauce
• 1 hot pepper

I let the machine run for a minute or two until a paste was formed....

...and then smothered the goat neck with the paste.  Covered with plastic wrap, into the fridge it went for a four-hour rest as I went off to the store for additional ingredients and other groceries.

Four hours later, the crock pot got its turn.  Into it went a bed of collard greens, topped with 4 or 5 plum tomatoes (I forget how many I used) quartered and crushed.

Next, I put the goat neck in the middle, and surrounded it with sliced sweet potatoes and some frozen mango chunks that we’d had in the freezer for a very long time trying to figure out what would happen to them.

I poured in about a cup of water, turned the crock pot to low and walked away.

5 hours later (and just as Hubby was walking in the door -- I know, I'm soooo domesticated), it was done!

This is what the veggies and meat looked like immediately out of the crock pot.

The flavors were great, with a nice balance between sweet and spicy.  My only “complaint” is that there isn’t a lot of meat on a goat neck.  Should I be surprised by this?  Probably not.  Here is how much we actually got:

We ended up with 4 moderately-sized portions of meat, and 5+ generous servings of vegetables.  So, we each ate a plate for dinner, made two full containers for lunch leftovers, plus one large veggies-only container as lunch leftovers.

One thing that did surprise me about goat neck was that the bone was not simply a spinal column.  It was one piece that came off like a vertebrae and then one much longer piece that didn’t come apart.  You can see the pieces in the picture above.  Weird, silly goats with their square pupils and apparently stiff necks.  Lol.

Crock Pot Oxtail Stew

Erhmahgerd sterw!  So yeah, wow, it’s been a while, but here we are back again.

Yesterday we made a pretty good meal (really, to serve as lunches at work) from some of the meat provided to us as part of M.F. Dulock’s “meat club.”  On the chopping block: oxtail.  If you don’t know what oxtail is (and admittedly, we didn’t either)….it’s exactly what it sounds like -- the appendage used by bovines to swat at flies on their buttocks.  ;)  There’s more meat on there than you’d think, though, and it turns out it’s great for braising and/or stewing.

Here’s the easy recipe (parsed down from one we found online, and amended slightly to our tastes)….

• 1.65 pounds oxtail, disjointed (this just means chopped up into singular vertebral chunks)
• Pork fat that was leftover in a pan where we had cooked breakfast bacon that day
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 cup beef stock
• 1/2 cup dry red wine
• 1/4 cup tomato sauce
• 6 peppercorns
• 1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 dried red chile pepper, chopped (some, but not all, seeds removed)
• 3 whole cloves
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 1 red bell pepper, chopped
• 1/2 tablespoon chopped parsley
• 3 potatoes, cut in chunks
• salt and pepper

Brown the oxtail pieces on all sides in the cast iron skillet with the pork fat, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.  Add the onions and garlic (with a bit more salt and pepper) and cook about 5 minutes more until the onions start to become translucent.

Put the potatoes and carrots in the bottom of crock pot, and season with salt and pepper.

Add the browned oxtails, onions, garlic, and remaining ingredients.

Cover and cook on low 6 hours or until the meat is easily pulled off (or falling off) the bones.

Quite delicious, super easy, and the house smelled fantastic all day, right from moment the meat went into the pork fat.  The weirdest part is that once you’ve gotten the meat off the bone of “normal” cuts, you are used to what the bones will look like.  Here, you end up with vertebrae.  Freaky.